GoKawiilA hot potato: Remember the excitement in the build-up to Cyberpunk 2077's release? CD Projekt Red had whipped the gaming world into a frenzy, only for it to become one of the biggest disappointments of all time. Not everyone thinks the studio has fully redeemed itself in the six years since then, including co-CEO Michał Nowakowski, but he believes those fans will be won back by The Witcher 4.
The Cyberpunk 2077 story is a familiar one. Following the disastrous launch in 2020, CDPR released numerous patches, eventually giving us the game we were expecting. The brilliant Phantom Liberty expansion briefly pushed Cyberpunk 2077 to an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam, something unimaginable a few years earlier.
In an interview with Edge, Nowakowski talked about how "heartbreaking" the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 was for the team and fans. And while you'd expect him to be happy about the way things turned out, the co-CEO has regrets.
"I'm not 100 per cent convinced we went through the full redemption arc," Nowakowski said. "I'm convinced that we lost the faith of some people indefinitely, and that's a fair thing."
But Nowakowski hopes that the wildly anticipated next Witcher game and other titles from CDPR will help win back those who've turned their backs on the Polish company.
One person who might not be won back so easily is Thomas Mahler, Moon Studios founder and director of the Ori series. In 2021, he blasted game designers who make big promises about upcoming titles only for consumers to be disappointed upon their release, calling them "snake oil salesmen." He also questioned why players forgive them so easily.
"The entire CDPR PR department took all the cues from what worked for Molyneux and Murray and just went completely apesh*t with it," Mahler wrote at the time. "Every video released by CDPR was carefully crafted to create a picture in players' minds that was just insanely compelling. They stopped just short of outright saying that this thing would cure cancer. This strategy resulted in a sensational 8 million pre-orders."
We still don't know when The Witcher 4 will arrive, but CDPR recently announced a surprise third expansion to 2015's The Witcher 3. Songs of the Past arrives next year, and, much like it did with Cyberpunk 2077 ahead of the Phantom Liberty expansion, CD Projekt is increasing the minimum PC requirements for the base game.
Cyberpunk 2077 isn't the only game that has experienced a full redemption arc, at least in most people's eyes. Sean Murray, founder of Hello Games, the studio behind No Man's Sky, hyped NMS so much before release that the studio received death threats when it was delayed by around six weeks.
But that excitement turned into disappointment after the game arrived with missing features, bugs, and other issues. The discrepancy between what we were promised and what we got led to an investigation by the UK's advertising standards agency and Valve requiring actual in-game screenshots for Steam listings.